


Of Dogs and Lions

by sugartrash



Category: Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Addiction, Blood, Canon-Typical Violence, Demonic Possession, Forced Orgasm, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Injury, M/M, Major Illness, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-04-21
Updated: 2015-05-19
Packaged: 2018-03-25 03:43:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,410
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3795418
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sugartrash/pseuds/sugartrash
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Cullen is tasked with handling Samson after his capture but Samson still holds most of the cards--for better or for worse, he knows Cullen's secrets. </p>
<p>(as usual i have no idea where this is going. it's a thing there will probably be more of the thing, have a nice day!)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Unequally Yoked

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Inquisitor Trevelyan has given Samson into Cullen's care, though which of them is imprisoned is up for debate.

"Well, this is cozy, isn't it, boy?"

Samson's voice was a rattle in his throat, seeds shaken in a dessicated gourd. Everything about him was ruined, he stank of lyrium and rot. Dry as he was from fever, he was still wet with sweat, scarlet beads that stained the sheets without stopping as though they seeped through from a red sea in the Fade, endless and corrupted.

Cullen could barely look at him. Trevelyan spoke of the Nightmare that served Corypheus. Samson was Cullen's nightmare, trapped in here with him, and Trevelyan put them here together. Cullen could leave but he was chained to his former friend with bonds forged from responsibility, loyalty, and darker things.

"Call it what you want." Cullen got up to put more wood on the fire. He remembered how cold he'd been when he was trying to get free of the lyrium, never warm enough. Strange that something so cool and blue could make him feel so warm.

Samson coughed, the coughing was new this week, a violent spasm that must have been agonizing but he laughed once it let him go. He spat into a basin by the bed and the steel curve of it rang as though someone had thrown in a handful of pebbles. Cullen stepped over to the bed to investigate.

When he picked it up, tiny red gems rolled around in the basin, leaving blood trails in their wake. Lyrium. Not simply a suspension of it in sweat but fully-formed crystals. Cullen's stomach clenched, washing bile up the back of his throat until he gagged.

"Don't worry," Samson said weakly. He sagged back into the twisted nest of red-stained sheets. "I'll be gone soon enough, boy. Me and my failures and your secrets off your hands."

"My secrets?" Cullen's hand shook as he set the basin back by the bed. He needed to call for fresh linens, hot water.

Clean lyrium. He could send to the Templars for clean lyrium. Maybe the blue would help flush out the red somehow. Maybe it'd fall prey to the same corruption as the red and Samson would die faster and for certain.

"Can't think why else you'd be here. Any damn fool can ask me questions about Corypheus." Samson coughed again until it ended in something like a sob. "Smarter men and women than you around here, ask better questions--not that you say a damn thing."

"I thought..." Cullen stopped at the door. "I thought I could help." Thought he could fight his fears. If he could save Samson, he could save himself.

Samson laughed at him, then, laughed until the cough seized him again. The cough echoed off the walls until it stopped, suddenly, and left Cullen in silence. Cullen turned to see Samson contorted, skeletal fingers tearing bloody gouges down his own throat as he struggled to breathe.

"No!" As though Samson could stop it, would obey him even if he could.

Cullen grabbed the vials left by the herbalist, pouring one after another into a goblet. Samson was soundless save for the spatter of blood on the floor as his fingers opened his veins. Elfroot, Embrium, Prophet's Laurel, Arbor Blessing--some part of him under the panic knew what it was doing.

Goblet in hand, Cullen pushed Samson back on the bed, wrested his hands from his throat one at a time and pinned them under his knees. There was no getting it down a closed throat but the great bloody rents in Samson's flesh might be the opening he needed to get the curative into his blood.

Cullen could have healed a battalion with the potion he poured over Samson's wounds. His hands were coated with it, and with Samson's tainted blood. He pressed it into the wounds until the edges of them began to mend. Samson's face was ashen, his lips violet, his eyes stared past Cullen at nothing at all.

"You don't get to do this," Cullen muttered. The edge of the goblet clattered against Samson's teeth as he flooded Samson's mouth and throat with it until the goblet emptied and potion burbled back out Samson's nostrils. "You don't get to die."

The red surged through Cullen, rage flooding him like red lyrium, corrupting him. He was distantly aware of his own voice bouncing from the cell walls, the fragility of Samson's body under his hands, under his fists. Something broke, bones or bed, but he couldn't stop.

"Boy." Hands on his face. Sticky, bloody, gentle hands. "That's enough, boy."

Cullen flung himself back, hit the wall behind him hard enough to shake the breath out of him. He slid down the wall, legs trembling too hard to hold him up. He felt poisoned, like he too was dying.

"I'm not leaving yet." Samson fought to rise from the wreckage.

The cell looked like a charnel house, blood and healing potion spattered the floors and walls, even the ceiling. The basin overturned had spilled the red crystals across the floor and that was the truly terrifying part. There was no containing it if it wanted to be loose.

"You don't have to be afraid." Somehow, Samson was standing, upright long enough to stagger over to Cullen. "I wouldn't tell your secrets, boy, if that's why you're here." He slid down the wall next to Cullen, draped one thin arm around Cullen's shoulders on the way down.

"It's not." Cullen covered his face with his hands but they were filthy, stinking of iron and elfroot.

"I know you, boy." Samson's bloody fingers caught in Cullen's hair. "You think I'm going to tell them the truth. I wouldn't do that to you, boy. I keep the secrets given me. Yours. Maddox's. All of 'em, I keep. All the nightmares and the lost memories, I take and I never tell. You think I'll tell about how you cried in the night, how the fear was so bad you pissed yourself in your sleep. I took care of you then. You think I'd tell them that? How I brought you more lyrium to keep the dreams away? I never told a soul. I never even told Corypheus."

"Shut up. Just shut up." Cullen was back there, back in Kirkwall with the chains and the weeping statues and the tattered Veil and his own horrors. The stone walls of their cell in the gallows reeked of fear and sorrow. He'd clung to what the Chantry told him to keep it all at bay.

"Or are you here for this?" Samson's arm tightened around his shoulders. "For the way I used to hold you in the night, your shining head against my chest. Before you despised me, before you reached for something more, you'd have died for me."

He wasn't wrong. Cullen had been grasping, desperate for something to keep him safe. He'd been intoxicated, enough to drug his conscience, by the way Meredith and Ulrik bent mages to their will. There had been safety in it, he'd thought. But Samson had known different. The irony was so bitter that he gagged on it, the irony that Samson had been the one who still held mages as human...redeemable. Worth saving.

"Are you afraid I'll tell them something worse?" Samson's voice curled against Cullen's ear, broken and raw but still so familiar. Comforting. Filthy and foul, degraded and defeated, Samson could still make a stone of himself for a man to set his back against in a fight--especially if he was fighting himself. "Afraid I'll tell them about the way you kissed me in the dark. Too scared to kiss me on the mouth, or maybe you thought I was sleeping, so you used to kiss me on the throat. Is that it? You're afraid I'll tell them about how hard you were against my thigh, the way you moved against me in your sleep, until you spilled and slept deeper still?"

"Please stop." Cullen didn't know he was crying until he spoke. "Maker, please. You made your point. I'm a hypocrite. I disgust you. Just stop. I'll tell them myself."

"Hypocrite, yes." Samson coughed, spat something wet to the side. "Disgusting, no. You never disgusted me. You never saw yourself like we did. Men follow you for a reason. You were like a young lion, fierce and golden. You think it disgusted me to give you what you needed? There's worse things, boy. Betrayal, that's a worse thing. Hurting the helpless, that's a worse thing. I've done worse. You've done worse. I'd tell you not to forget that we're not much different from each other but I think you know. Those yellow eyes of yours were always clear, when you forgot to be afraid. Stop being afraid, boy. What's there to fear?"

Everything. Everything was terrifying. Samson was terrifying, as intoxicating as lyrium, as seductive as a demon.

"Not you," Cullen lied. He pushed away, got to his knees and then to his feet. "Get up." He could barely stand on his own but he grabbed Samson by the blood-soaked front of the ragged tunic they'd given him to wear and tried to lift him. Samson struggled to his feet, let Cullen shift him to the bed. "Don't move," Cullen ordered. "This area needs to be decontaminated."

"As you say," Samson said easily. He sprawled on the broken bed.

"I'm here because you're useful." Being cruel always brought a kind of strength with it. Cullen had learned that from Meredith, hated himself for it and used it anyway. He stopped with one hand on the door. "If we can cure you, maybe we can save innocent people you condemned to die from this poison."

"They did the same to us, boy. They did it to you. All of them. They lived in the safety we bought them with our lives, with our sanity, with our selves." Samson managed to push himself up enough to lean against the wall. The tunic rode up around his stringy thighs, leaving him exposed. The indignity was obscene, offensive, and arousing at once. "All I did was put them to the same purpose. I didn't lie to any of them. I used volunteers when I could--which is more than I can say for those who made men like Maddox."

"Did you really think it would be better under Corypheus?" Cullen rounded on him, crossed the room in two strides. "At least tell me you thought it would be better, that you were doing it for the right reasons."

"I can't, boy." Samson grinned crookedly. "I didn't think it'd be better. Just thought it'd be the truth. And if you don't think I tried to make things better before I tried to make 'em worse, well. You don't remember me then."

"The letter. The conduct unbecoming." Clarity dawned, far too late.

"And then I became what you feared, what you all feared most. Like Maddox, the way mages could hardly look at him. All you could see was the pathetic wretch you feared becoming if you stepped out of line." Samson shrugged one thin shoulder. "I did terrible things, boy. I'm a weak man. We can't all be the young lions of the world, the ones who shake off the curse so they can save the day. Don't go feeling sorry for me. I would have watched the world burn and not felt an ounce of regret."

"That's the first real lie you've told since you got here." Cullen turned away from him. "I'll leave you to the healers for a while. I have things to do."

"Come see me again some time," Samson rasped. "We'll catch up some more. You owe me that much, boy."

Cullen closed the door without answering, locked it tight. Like every secret and lie he harboured, Samson was still there behind it. He scrubbed his hands over his face, trying to erase any trace of the tears, even if he couldn't wash the rest away. There was no getting clean.


	2. Dreams of Dreams

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Over a decade later, Cullen is still haunted by the events at Kinloch Hold. He dreams of the dreams that nearly destroyed him during his imprisonment. Heed the tags.

Cullen's fingers scraped along his breastplate, he clawed at his armour to feel his nails bend back and tear. It was the only way he could remember that he was still clothed, clothed and filthy and almost too weak to stand under the weight of all his steel.

"Yield." The voice in his ears was slick as oil, tender as a mother's. "Sweet one. You need only yield and all will be well."

Mouths pressed against his, one and many at once, hot tongues slipping inside him, trying to creep into him that way. He pushed at his assailants but there was nothing there to touch. Nothing to touch but still there were hands all over his naked skin.

"Never." Cullen bit at his lips until they bled, trying to savage them beyond the point that he could believe anyone, anything, would kiss them.

"I have everything you need," the demon murmured. Its voice dropped into a new register, turning masculine. "I can be everything you will not let yourself desire. My poor knight." It stroked his hair. "Do you even know?"

"Don't do this." The words were out before Cullen could stop them. Begging was useless, it was a sign of weakness.

"Don't do what?" Strong arms embraced Cullen, held him up and held him close. Dark hair swung down to hide his shame from the world. He could smell lyrium on a mage's breath and the resinous scent of elfroot potions on his skin. "I only want to make you happy. You would have killed me and I still only want to make you happy."

"Stop." Cullen willed his awareness back to the physical, back to where he was sick from thirst, huddled in a corner, hands pressed between his thighs now to ensure he didn't touch himself. Didn't push his clothes aside, slide his hands up his own thighs, didn't... "I won't do this."

"You're so tired, love."

Cullen's bed had never felt so soft. Not his bed, no. It was too grand, with thick posts carved in vine motifs rising almost to the ceiling. The room was vast and well-appointed. He'd been here once before, on an errand. Greagoir's room.

"This isn't my room." He tried to get up but a gentle hand on his chest pressed him back into the pillows.

"Nonsense, Cullen." Warm voice, familiar. Another glimpse of long, black hair and dark eyes. "You've been Knight Commander as long as I've been First Enchanter. You're just tired." Lean body against his, long fingers tracing his features.

"Please don't do this." Cullen covered his face with his hands. "Not him."

"Not who?" His hands peeled from his face, his mouth kissed tenderly, over and over. "Harrowings are always so hard on you, love. I'm sorry it went poorly. It gives you such nightmares of that terrible time when we were still just boys. But it's long over now."

"Over?" Cullen so desperately wanted it to be true.

"For decades." Surely this was real. The face before him was lined with the passing of years, the dark hair shot with so much silver, but...oh, he was still beautiful. "I found you then and we've never been parted since, all these years. Trust me."

"I do." Cullen touched him, the softness of his mouth, the lines at the corners of his eyes. "You can't be here, someone will know."

"And then tell the Knight Commander?" Laughter, so familiar, and then the soft noise of a robe being discarded. "Or perhaps the First Enchanter." Kisses pressed to Cullen's throat, hands in his hair. "Ah, love, we have always been such a scandal."

A scandal. They shouldn't. Wouldn't. Cullen wouldn't. He wrenched his head back, struck the cold stone wall behind him. Voices seeped down from above, voices without words, the wailing of mages tortured past sanity. This was real.

"Stop, please." Cullen struggled to stand. If he was standing, he couldn't be back in that bed, back in his dreams. "I never wanted that. I never wanted--"

"Me?" Cullen sprawled in the great, soft bed, pinned under a body he hadn't let himself imagine, not even in his moments alone. A body bare and warm, lightly muscled and untouched by scars or sun. "Let me remind you."

Ecstasy. A nearly unbearable warmth, tight and slick, engulfed his erection; the lips he longed for pressed to his to stifle his cries. Was this how it was, was it truly this blissful? Cullen understood overthrowing everything for this. He would. He would give up everything for this moment.

"I love you," he said, instead of begging for it to end. He tangled his hands in long, silky hair, arched into that heat.

"I love you, too, Cullen." Soft mouth, soft breath, soft hands. "I've always wanted you."

"Don't stop." Why would they stop? Maker, what would make him stop this delicious, slow rut? Everything he'd ever wanted was this and the pleasure so close to overwhelming him. It was so perfect as to be unreal.

It wasn't real. Cullen clawed at the wall behind him with bleeding fingers, forced himself to feel the pain instead of the twist of fine linens caught in his fists while he writhed in the throes of passion.

"Stop, please, stop." Cullen didn't know if he was begging the demon or himself. He pressed both hands to his groin now, trying to stifle his rebellious body as he struggled to remember how to cleanse himself of magic and desire. "Maker, no."

"Beloved. My knight, my Cullen." That voice, still, breathless with passion. The heat of the body against his, the pressure, the sensation were driving Cullen mad. "Don't stop. Please. I'm so close."

Cullen forced his eyes open, found he was staring at the floor, down on all fours. There was no soft bed, no lover, no bliss, and still the ghost of the pleasure would not let him go. His hips moved in spite of him, some piece of his mind was still caught in the fantasy where he made love to a man he couldn't even look in the eye.

"No, no, no." He was stronger than this. He could not let himself be lost.

"Oh, Cullen, I love you." His name, spoken shamelessly, broken with pleasure. The body clenched, heat spilled across his belly, he heard his name again and again.

"I can't," he sobbed, as the pressure overwhelmed him. "Please don't, please stop, no." Orgasm swept through him and he spent himself in shuddering spurts inside his clothes.

Cullen gagged on a surge of shame and bile, his humiliation made worse by how desperately he wanted more. If he only closed his eyes, he would be back there in his private paradise with the lover he could never have in this life. All this would end, the pleasure would be without end and without cost. Eternity in the arms of his lover awaited him.

"We never even spoke." The depth of the violation gripped him and he vomited up the meagre contents of his stomach. "Anyone else." He spat acid as his resolve crystalized. "If it had been anyone else." Any dream less secret, less precious, perhaps he would have given way entirely.

"Your heart's desire and you never even spoke?" The demon laughed hollowly. "Pitiful thing. I see it now. Perhaps I should leave you to Despair."

"I would rather die first." Cullen fought off a wave of cold, shook off the encroaching shadows. "I would rather die. But first, I will remember how to pray."

And then, the cold was driven back, but not by his will. A door slamming, the rattle of armour, the thud of a staff on stone. And voices, sane and real, or was it all a dream again? Was it just the desire to have survived that drew him back in?

"A templar. One survives." The voice, that same voice.

"This trick again? I know what you are. It won't work. I will stay strong."

"Cullen. Don't you recognize me?" So soft, the voice, so concerned, long fingers splayed against the shimmering wall of the cage. "I remember him. Cullen. You're safe."

"I can't do this again!" Cullen's voice bounced off the walls and he sat bolt upright, scattering papers from his desk. A wine glass tipped and shattered. He covered his face with his hands to stifle a sob before he knew he was crying.

I can't do this again.


End file.
